The Whole Lanyards

This week seems to have been one for breaking things. There was the back door to my bedroom, which leads onto a balcony, on which the lock has suddenly snapped (indirectly a result of the four or five days of almost relentless rain we had earlier), and then my phone froze, with no hope of a way out. It seems the smarter a 'smart' phone is, the more likely that it's actually quite stupid; when I was young (alright, two years ago), 99% of problems with your phone could be fixed eventually by simply taking the battery out and putting it in again. But now, since the battery is often irremovable from the casing of the phone, you're kinda screwed. The third thing that might have got broken this week is possibly my ribs. Hm, seems that I should really have put that one in at the top of the list.

It wasn't exactly an event that I could fill into a form that started with the question 'have you had an accident that wasn't your fault', but then it wasn't something that I really saw coming. I'm always losing my keys, so I have them attached to a lanyard. I didn't know that the big strappy things that ID cards and the like were called lanyards, but I suppose they had to have a more elegant name than 'big strappy things'. I've managed to build up a reasonable collection of them, since I get one attached to a press pass every time I'm reviewing up in Edinburgh for the fringe festival. It's the closest I feel to importance all year.

It was this lanyard that was dangling out of my pocket as I was cycling home on Wednesday. You might be able to see what's coming next, even if I didn't, or, indeed, the cars that were directly following me. The big strappy thing dropped, hung, and then wrapped itself against my front wheel. It was like a particularly cheaply made instalment in a Final Destination movie. The bike very suddenly stopped. I suffered no such impediment until roughly three seconds later, when I smashed into the road. The car behind me, luckily a sensible driver, was able to stop in time (quite remarkable when you think about it, since the cyclist in front of him didn't even do anything like braking, they simply .. stopped. It must have been like watching someone slam into an invisible wall). The driver got out, and helped me retrieve all my stuff, and get it off the road. He also asked me if I was ok, sounding just about as shocked as I felt. I didn't sound shocked at all, but this was largely due to all speech having been winded out of me.

I continued down to the train station (just before I got there, I heard some kid from the school where I work shouting abuse at me, presumably unaware that I'd just escaped death. I like to think that he would have stuck to his morals, and still continued to throw names in the direction of my bloodied, twitching corpse), and eventually got home. After a bit of a sleepless night, I struggled (literally, the pain was getting quite bad) into work, but by the time I arrived, I'd realised that work was going to be very difficult, so after a convoluted series of conversations, I was able to get myself to Accident & Emergency.

Where ... they were able to do almost nothing. That's the thing with ribs, it seems. They don't even x-ray anymore, because it won't actually change what they do afterwards, which, essentially, is not a very great deal. So, there's every chance that I could currently be walking around with a cracked rib, which certainly is something to follow the fake dislocated shoulder I had last month. In all reality, it's reasonably likely that the ribs are simply very bruised, (it doesn't seem that they are actually broken, since they're not, you know, letting air out of my lungs or anything like that), but the pain is still quite often terrific. But only when I move. Apart from that, it's fine.

Odd was the inescapable guilt I still had about having to take time off from work. I wonder what I would consider an appropriate reason to take some time off work. Decapitation, perhaps, or maybe just the loss of a lesser limb. The staff at the hospital were all fantastic, and another reason why I'm always so pro-NHS. We hear a lot of negative stuff about our health service (thank you, Mr Lansley), but at the very least, when I go to them in pain to hear that there's not actually anything they can do, it's a relief that I'm not having to spend two hundred quid for the privilege.